Film Review: Sound of a Million Insects, Light of a Thousand Stars

“Buried under fallen leaves alongside a country road.”

Context is everything for Tomonari Nishikawa’s “Sound of a Million Insects, Light of a Thousand Stars.” Something you’d expect to see in an art gallery, the coda message shines new light on what you have just witnessed, in what is a political message using the age-old magic of film.

Sixty-six seconds of constant flickers and movement on screen, show what looks like 35mm film under certain stresses, seemingly at the end of its life. What starts like an extreme close-up shot gradually becomes more and more frantic, with the image becoming increasingly distorted.

Following this image, we are left with a message that 100 feet of 35mm film was buried under leaves approximately twenty-five kilometers from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Left overnight in 2014, the area had been deemed safe for return by the government, though Nishikawa shows that radiation is an invisible threat.  

sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars (2 min., 35mm, sound, Japan, 2014) from Tomonari Nishikawa on Vimeo.

In a simple and interesting way, Nishikawa shows that there is still a lot of activity in the air in the area, which, of course, goes unseen. It is also a reminder as to the impact of physical film itself in communicating ideas. Something that would not have been possible with digital technology, it shows how much richer using film can be in capturing a moment.  

An almost visual haiku, as the name suggests, this shows man’s impact on nature, and how cityscapes have removed the sites and sounds of the natural world. Man may have left the region, but the effects of our actions are still strong. Something that we are often blind to.